After a rather slow couple of weeks post-Duskmourn: House of Horror, the MTG news cycle is back in full swing. Last Friday, five brand-new Secret Lair drops were unveiled, each with mechanically unique cards. Later today, Wizards is hosting MagicCon: Las Vegas with major panels and events galore. Before we get to that, however, Hasbro had some MTG news of its own.
Yesterday, Hasbro held its latest quarterly earnings presentation. While this event was primarily for investors, there are often some juicy reveals for MTG players buried in there too. Unsurprisingly, throughout the presentation, Hasbro CEO, Chris Cocks was keen to flaunt the recent success of MTG, especially the new Marvel crossover.
This MTG crossover, in particular, is great news for Hasbro and its many investors as it’s poised to be astronomically successful. At the same time, many MTG players are unsurprisingly excited about the upcoming crossover, including the new Secret Lair cards. Unfortunately, Cocks had some bad news about this upcoming release, for MTG fans, at least.
A Suspected Sell Out
There’s no question that the new Secret Lair Marvel Superdrop is going to be popular and successful. This was obvious from the moment that his new Secret Lair drop was first announced. Not only are most of the new mechanically unique cards fantastic for Commander, but the reprints are stellar too. To top it all off, this is a Marvel crossover and the first of its kind in that regard.
The Secret Lair Marvel Superdrop seems to be the perfect storm of collectability, desirability, and value. As a result, many MTG players are expecting each of the five drops to sell out incredibly quickly. That said, Wizards did sort of fix Secret Lair’s long problem with selling out too fast recently.
While we don’t know exactly what happened behind the scenes, the Camp Totally Safe Superdrop took a while to start selling out. This was particularly surprising considering there was a Hatsune Miku-themed crossover drop in the collection. Previously, these have been seen as gold dust and have sold out in just a handful of hours.
Speculating about what happened, it’s believed that Wizards finally adjusted and significantly increased the print run for these drops. Thanks to this, fears about the Marvel Superdrop selling out immediately were slightly allayed for a time. Even if Wizards hadn’t fully learned their lesson, it just made sense Wizards would want to sell a lot of Marvel MTG cards.
Furthering this reassuring point, when speaking to Polygon, Wizards hyped up the product’s print run. When being shown the cards, senior product designer Daniel Nguyen reportedly stated that Wizards had printed “a lot of it.” While this may be true, it now seems that Wizards of the Coast may not have gone far enough…
“This one is an all-caps LIMITED RELEASE […] When I say ‘all caps,’ I mean there’s a lot of it. We made a lot of it. We’ve been gathering our numbers. So it’s not print-to-demand, but we’ve printed quite a bit.”
Daniel Nguyen
A Word of Warning
In Hasbro’s latest investor presentation, Chris Cocks touted the impending success of the Secret Lair Marvel Superdrop. Lauding the nature of the product being a Marvel crossover, alongside upcoming reveals, this expected success obviously isn’t surprising. What did catch players off guard, however, is Cocks’ claims that “We are expecting each mini set to immediately sell out.”
On social media, MTG players were hardly shocked by this revelation. On Reddit, for instance, nickeldoodle succinctly commented “In related news ‘no shit.’” This sentiment was echoed throughout a recent thread, as this trend has been very expected. At the same time, however, many MTG players wondered why on earth Wizards would allow this to happen.
Should a Secret Lair sell out immediately, it’s indicative that demand far outweighed supply. This means that Hasbro is leaving money on the table by not printing more MTG cards or increasing prices. As mrcelophane points out, this makes it a very strange thing to boast about to investors, especially following an overall 15% revenue drop.
This balance has always been a confusing detail to the release of limited-run Secret Lair drops. Since it’s in Wizards’ best interest to sell as much product as possible, it’s baffling that lightning-fast sales happen at all, let alone often. Perhaps print numbers are constantly being adjusted behind the scenes, but we’ve seen countless drops selling out too quickly already.
Hopefully, Wizards can strike the right balance going forward to keep everyone happy. Optimistically, the right model is already being experimented with in the Pixel Perfect Secret Lair drop. This unique charity-supporting drop is both limited-run and print-to-demand, giving players and Wizards alike the best of both worlds.
Fingers on Buzzers
Sadly, following Cocks’ warning, MTG players can’t really afford to wait around if they want the upcoming Marvel cards. Releasing on November 4th, players will have to be ready and waiting for this Superdrop to go live to place orders. Should this drop sell out as quickly as Cocks’ suggests then there may only be a few hours before sales start ending.
Frustratingly, this comment from Cocks has undoubtedly made the situation worse for excited players. By claiming the Superdrop is desired and lucrative, many more scalpers may be attracted to the sale. This, in turn, may cause the supply to be drained even faster, resulting in more players missing out.
Given this could be a real problem, we can only hope that Wizards will impose strict buy limits to stop scalpers from ruining everything. Whether or not that will be the case, however, remains to be seen. Ultimately, we’re just going to have to wait until November 4th to find out what happens. Until then, at least we have MagicCon: Las Vegas to look forward to.
